Notes

ultural space."30 However pervasive her folk m
festations may be, certain Mexican-American artists h
challenged the image they associate with colonial insti
tions, gender discrimination, and the passivity of the Ca
lic church. In short, the Virgin of Guadalupe is still p
ceived as both a symbol heralding freedom and a signifi
submission. That she continues not only to establish par
ters of national identity but also to convey dissent testifi
the potency of the image.
Notes
1. The premise that the Virgin of Guadalupe conveys a paradoxical message was
influenced by two important sources: Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe:
The Formation ofMexican National Consciousness, 1532-1815, trans. Benjamin Keen
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and William Taylor, "The Virgin of
Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion,"
American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (February 1987): 9-33. The term "symbol of libera-
tion" was applied to Guadalupe by Taylor, 20. This paper has also benefited from
discussions with Stacie Widdifield and Lynn Shafer in 1987 and from written
exchanges with Stafford Poole, C.M., in 1990.
2. Eric R. Wolf, "The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol," Journal of
American Folklore 71 (1958): 34-39.
3. Considerable scholarship either endorses or refutes the reliability of early appari-
tion accounts. According to apparitionists, the germinal source is a Nahuatl docu-
ment titled Nican Mopohua (Here is Recounted), often attributed to a sixteenth-
century native scribe, Antonio Valeriano. Both the authorship and dating of the Nican
Mopohua are contested; the first securely dated account of the apparition legend does
Torre Villar and Ramiro Navarro, Testimonios hist6r
Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1982).
4. Tonantzin is one of several names associated with an Aztec female earth-and-
fertility deity complex whose members included Toci (Our Grandmother) and Cihua-
coati (Woman-Serpent). It is not clear whether the appellation Tonantzin is pre-
Hispanic in origin or a postconquest construct to facilitate merger with the reverential
names given the Virgin Mary.
5. See Edmundo O'Gorman, Destierro de sombras (Mexico City: Universidad Nacio-
nal Aut6noma de Mexico, 1986), 7-21, 67-91. The origins of the shrine, its
dedication, and the exact nature of the original cult image (sculpture, print, or
painting?) have been embroiled in polemic from the time of Francisco de Busta-
mante's iconoclastic sermon and subsequent testimonials, referred to collectively as
the "Informaci6n de 1556." On this, see Torre Villar and Navarro, Testimonios,
36-141.
6. Elisa Vargas Lugo suggests Albrecht Diirer's 1498 woodcut of the Apocalyptic
Woman; "Iconologia guadalupana," in Imdgenes guadalupanas: Cuatro siglos (Mex-
ico City: Imprenta Madero, 1988), 60. I am currently investigating graphic and mura
prototypes for the Guadalupe icon.
7. Similarities in the structural patterns of Spanish and Mexican Marian legends are
discussed by William Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval andRenaissance Spain
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 4, 18-21; Victor Turner and Edith
Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1978), 40-52; and Anna-Britta Hellbom, "Las apariciones de la Virgen d
Guadalupe en Mexico y en Espafia," Ethnos 1-2 (1964): 58-72.
8. Bernardino de Sahagin, Florentine Codex: Introductory Volume, trans. and ed.
Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble (Santa Fe: School of American Research
and University of Utah, 1982), 90.
9. See Viceroy Martin Enriquez's letter written to Philip II in 1575, cited in Torr
Villar and Navarro, Testimonios, 148-49. On the timing and extent of Guadalupe's
following, Taylor, "The Virgin of Guadalupe," 15-19, concludes that not until the
eighteenth century did devotion to her penetrate beyond the capital into the provinces
10. On miscegenation, see Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman, The Course of
Mexican History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), chaps. 12, 15,
21.
11. Reprinted in Torre Villar and Navarro, Testimonios, 152-260.
12. The other three were Luis Lasso de la Vega (1649), Luis Becerra Tanco (1666),
and Francisco de Florencia, S.J. (1688); see Francisco de la Maza, El gua-
dalupanismo mexicano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1981 [1953]),
54-97.
13. The Sanchez frontispiece is illustrated in Album conmemorativo del 450 aniv
sario de las apariciones de Nuestra Ser~ora de Guadalupe (Mexico City: Edici
Buena Nueva, 1981), fig. 17. The nopal cactus is an Aztec symbol for Tenochtitlh
14. See p. 592 in Francisco Javier Clavijero's essay on Guadalupe's cult in 178
Torre Villar and Navarro, Testimonios, 578-98.
15. Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe, 255.
16. Taylor, "The Virgin of Guadalupe," 20.
17. Clavijero, in Torre Villar and Navarro, Testimonios, 593.
18. For God the Father Painting the Virgin of Guadalupe, see Album conmemorat
figs. 85, 86.
19. Matt S. Meier, "Maria insurgente," Historia Mexicana 23, no. 3 (January-M
1974): 469-71.
20. Torre Villar and Navarro, Testimonios, 1014-15, n. 6; and Meier, "Maria i
gente," 473-76.
21. Taylor, "The Virgin of Guadalupe," 23-24, has shown that the Hidalgo m
ment was based in the Bajio region north of Mexico City, an area that had the fe
Indians.
22. See Moises Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato: La vida social, vol. 4 of Historia
moderna de Mexico (Mexico City: Edici6n Hermes, 1970), 469.
23. Torre Villar and Navarro, Testimonios, 1129 (author's translation).
24. Ibid., 1209-10 (author's translation).
25. Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato, 455-69.
26. Ibid., 452-54.
27. Taylor, "The Virgin of Guadalupe," 19.
28. On the social and agrarian reforms that ultimately brought the Indians of Mexico
into the mainstream of national life, see Meyer and Sherman, The Course of Mexican
History, chaps. 33-36.
29. See also Shifra M. Goldman, "The Iconography of Chicano Self-Determination:
Race, Ethnicity, and Class," Art Journal 49, no. 2 (1990): 167-73.
30. Amalia Mesa-Bains, personal communication, 1987.
JEANETTE FAVROT PETERSON, assistant professor of art
history, University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author
of The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and
Imperial Policy in Sixteenth-century Mexico (1992).
ART JOURNAL
47
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